A long way, but we’re not there yet

Community Columnist

Cazenovia  My immediate family consists of myself, my wife, our two sons and two daughters. I feel it’s my responsibility to care for them all, but not solely my responsibility. The burden is distributed evenly regardless of age, financial status or gender.

We are much like an army or a team, peacefully defending our way of life, with different places to stand and separate things to do. I always make dinner and take the garbage out.

They refresh my soul.

Recently, Republican presidential hopeful Rick Santorum, revealed that he had concerns about women in combat because of the emotions that might be involved.

“I think that could be a very compromising situation, where people naturally may do things that may not be in the interest of the mission,” he said in a CNN interview with reporter John King. He said men would be distracted in the line of fire, acting chivalrous to a fault. However, according to a report from the Pew Research Center, all genders are equally likely to be affected by emotions that spring up as a result of military service.

Yes, you’ve come a long way baby, but there are still those wishing to impede the progress of social equality. Even though someone like Cazenovia resident and New York Air National Guard Col. Dawne Deskins has been selected as the next commander of the Eastern Air Defense Sector, becoming the first female commander of the unit, there are still those obstinate social Luddites, like relationship counselor Jon Gray who wrote “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus,” believing that problems between the sexes are a result of fundamental differences between the genders, which is an awful lot like saying blacks are from Africa and whites are from Europe.

Even author Virginia Wolff, who believed that unequal portions of femininity and masculinity were merely ingredients of either gender said, women much more interesting to men than men are to women because women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.